2011-07-22

Breaking eggs

So this guy had told himself that in order to achieve certain desirable goals, regrettably a large number of children had to be slaughtered as brutally as possibly. A sure sign of psychopathology one would think, but this kind of calculation is common among those who go as statesmen and strategists: “To hasten the end of the war, we are forced to bomb these civilians.” Unless we want to consider well-known heroes as psychopaths, we have to assume that the ends in fact do justify the means. The question then devolves to what ends justify the killing of people who don’t necessarily feel that their deaths would improve the world and who gets to define those ends. Is it OK if it is our elected representatives, presumably acting on our wishes?

So is it that the psychopath is the one who bears to actually meet the victims, while we normal ones are allowed the same kind of thinking as long as we do not personally create the corpses?